CIPP Tube Manufacturing

Many companies offering trenchless rehabilitation depend on others for the technology and products they use. They have little or no control over the production of the materials they install in your sewer system. At Insituform, we manufacture our Insituform® cured-in-place pipe (CIPP) tubes at our manufacturing facilities, which are certified to ISO 9001:2008 standards. Therefore, we control every step of the manufacturing process and have the quality systems in place to ensure that our tubes are made to our exact specifications. As a sole-source provider, our total quality system ensures consistency in CIPP tube manufacturing and reliability during installation.

We select only premium-quality raw materials to manufacture the tubes used in Insituform® CIPP. To ensure that they meet our specifications for thickness and strength, we put each tube through more than 25 separate quality checks. These tests, along with the detailed records we keep, help ensure that all of our tubes meet our stringent quality standards for trenchless CIPP rehabilitation.

To create uniform thickness around the full circumference of the Insituform® tube, we developed and patented a method for sewing together the butted ends of our felt. Our experience has shown that the strongest tubes with the fewest wrinkles are made with butt-sewn seams. Overlapped seams often create uneven thickness and surface wrinkles.

We then coat our felt tubes with a permanently-bonded, continuous layer of polypropylene, which is 50 percent thicker than conventional coatings. The polypropylene coating is firmly bonded to the felt and is resistant to hydrolysis and chemical attack. We have found that our polypropylene coating lasts longer than the polyurethane coating used by other companies offering trenchless pipeline rehabilitation.